About *Holdover*

Holdover is a Canadian publication about precision shooting, firearms, and the policies that surround both. It runs out of Ottawa and is operated by Steve Coppola, a UX and product designer, a licensed PAL/RPAL holder, and a precision shooter and handloader who came to the sport far later than most.

I started shooting in the spring of 2025. That puts me on the other side of an unusual line: I joined this community after the major legislative shifts of the last several years, not before. I didn't lose a collection. I didn't watch rifles I'd owned for decades reclassified out from under me. I came in cold, with no prior stake, and I was surprised by what I found.

What I found was a sport and a community - one of the most welcoming, technically rigorous, and genuinely decent groups of people I've spent time around - that was being quietly pushed out of public life. I couldn't square what I was reading in the news with the Canadians I was meeting at clubs, ranges, and gun stores. I got curious, and then I got deliberate about it. I read the Firearms Act. I read the regulations, the Orders in Council, the Public Safety Canada consultation documents, the Hansard debates. I tried to understand how we got here.

I'll be honest about where this led me. The more I read, the harder it became to describe Canada's firearms policy as a good-faith public safety project. Much of it reads as political calculus dressed up in safety language, paid for by licensed, law-abiding owners who were never the problem. That view informs Holdover's advocacy coverage, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it isn't a partisan position. I'm not a traditionally right-leaning voter, and I have real discomfort with the idea of voting on a single issue. I raise this because I think a lot of Canadian shooters feel the same tension, and I want Holdover to be a place where you can read serious policy coverage without having to swallow a political package you don't actually hold.

The other half of Holdover, and probably the larger half, is the hobby itself. I am fully in. I've built out a collection deliberately, trying to learn platforms rather than accumulate them: bolt guns, semi-autos, different actions, different calibres, so I can write about the tradeoffs from somewhere other than a catalogue page. I started reloading from scratch and have been working through it with the help of experts online and across the country.

I'm still an amateur marksman. I say that plainly because it matters: Holdover isn't written from a pedestal. It's written by someone in the middle of learning, in public, and willing to show the work.

Holdover exists because I want Canadian precision shooters, hunters, collectors, and new licence holders to have a publication that treats them like adults. Technical content that doesn't waste your time with safety boilerplate you already live by. Gear coverage without affiliate hyperbole. Handloading content that respects the fact that you can read a load manual. Advocacy writing that cites primary sources instead of secondary commentary, and refuses to traffic in either outrage or resignation.

If you're already part of this community, I hope Holdover is useful to you. If you're new to it, as I was a year ago, I hope it's a reasonable place to start.

Holdover is published by Input UX Inc., a UX and product design consultancy based in Ottawa. The site is reader-supported. Where gear, optics, or reloading components are covered, any affiliate or sponsored relationship will be disclosed in the piece itself.

Standards And Contact Paths

Holdover keeps public standards pages so readers can check how the site handles sourcing, corrections, disclosures, privacy, and Canadian firearms reference material.

• Editorial Standards
• Sources And Verification
• Corrections
• Disclosures
• Privacy